


The Oldest Sport

by Timballisto



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen, Point of view of a conscripted Yanjingi soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-09 22:35:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2000502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timballisto/pseuds/Timballisto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If prostitution is the oldest trade, war is the oldest sport.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Oldest Sport

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before Battle Magic came out. So technically it's not cannon, but it still fits in pretty well actually.

People don't really understand. Not really.

They see your uniform, your shining breastplate, the weapons of glory you wield in your hands and wonder to themselves about your victories, your battles.

They never really think about the feeling, the sick, disgusted abhorrence you feel when your sword crunches into someone's spinal column because you miscalculated your slash. They don't think about the messy blood that sprays everywhere when you take off an unsuspecting victim's head and stains your face for days because you don't have any water to spare. No soldier breathes a word to his family about the battles that rage on for hours, men pissing where they stand because their commander had ordered them to hold that line!

They don't think about the screams of the dying as they rave and moan in the hospital tents, bodies broken and minds splintered from pain and grief and heat. The cries of carrion crows that fly above like the fingers of Death or the sheets of oily black smoke that billow from the piles of the dead.

The Emperor of Yanjing sure as hell doesn't think about the common man when he orders his big campaigns against the Namornese or the widespread genocides of the hill people that live in the highlands above his precious rice plains.

I doubt he's ever had to lift a finger for himself, never had to take a human life with his own smooth, unblemished, hands or even had to watch one of the executions he orders. He can snap his fingers with nails filed and manicured and order someone's death but it will never be real to him. It would be as if the annoyance just… disappeared.

Even that mage, Briar and that great mage, Rosethorn who waded through the dead, escaping the looters- they don't even really know. They smelled death, touched death, killed… but they were never caught up in the heat, the filth, and the utter carnage of the oldest sport. The pure brutality of man killing man without the trappings of magic or nobility- they've never had a life placed in their hands and wrung it out, just to survive.

Life is hard- I can still hear the screaming and feel the warm spatter of blood on my face, the stench even now, when I'm old and grey. My wife, my children… they've all become used to my eccentricities, my night terror.

Gyongxe is now a dusty eddy, carved out of cliffs and filled with sand but it lives on, like a disease- it curdles in your mind and breaks you down until you don't know whether to go on or to surrender to peaceful darkness. Gyongxe has that effect on people.

It never really leaves you alone.


End file.
